As one of the major milestones in your life, graduating deserves your memory to a large extent. In such a special occasion which would be filled with a flurry of excitement, taking some excellent graduation photos would be quite necessary. Nowadays, even some kids may tend to have the graduation ceremonies asides from high school students and college students. Then, how to capture these moments in a special way? In this article, some important photo taking tips and creative photo ideas would be posted here for your further references. What you need to do is to put them into practice and make your graduation photos look in an amazing way.

Part 1: 4 Tips on How to Take Graduation Photos

Graduation is an important moment. It should be recorded as beautifully as possible. To take great graduation photos, you need to know some tips and tricks below.

1. Use DSLR or Mirrorless Camera

So what points should you pay attention to before taking graduation photos? First of all, you need to use a DSLR camera or a mirrorless camera which would present high resolution photo. The main difference between a camera and a mobile phone on the function of taking photos is that the camera's sensor is larger to ensure the quality of the picture. For most people, graduation photos taken with a large aperture and wide angle must be more powerful in comparison. Therefore, you can choose the most suitable DSLR camera with the proper prices to take the graduation photos.

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2. Use Large ISO Indoor

In fact, in any case, the sensitivity of the photos should be as low as possible, especially in indoor environments, because the light is relatively worse than outdoors, the same ISO is often much worse than the image quality taken with the same ISO outdoors! Therefore, indoors actually need to use a lower sensitivity than outdoors to increase the exposure time. If you are taking a graduation photo indoors, in order to ensure the quality of the photo and highlight the portrait, usually the ISO should not be as high as 800.

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3. Take Close-up Photos

In order to make your graduation photos more outstanding, you should put more attention on the close-up photos which are more impressive. While, the focus of shooting close-up photos must be on the eyes of people. For the scene, you can choose the iconic buildings of the school, the dining hall, the classroom, the playground, the school gate, etc. Then you can use the commonly used two-to-three-part composition for the close-up.

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4. Enhance Graduation Photos

Taking photos is the essential step for most users. In order to obtain better graduation photos, the post-editing could be the part you should not miss. In order to get better photos, you have to enhance the photos with some best photo apps. Among various photo enhancement tools, Leawo PhotoIns could help you to enhance the original photos with its AI enhancer tool. The detailed information related to this tool would be introduced below.

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Part 2: 8 Best Graduation Photo Ideas

In order to present your best side on the graduation day, taking the following photo ideas to obtain the most unique and funny graduation experiences.

1. Focus on close-up photos

For most graduation photos, they are taken in group. But in order to make the graduation photos more special, you can focus on the close-up photos. In details, instead of taking a lot of people in one photo, you can choose to take a single person photo. You can choose your most favorite buildings, such as the library, or the classroom, take some close-up photos in these backgrounds which could easily remind you of the campus life in the future. But if you prefer this method, an excellent and professional equipment would be quite necessary.

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2. Capture the Joy of the Day

Graduation day is full of joy. Therefore, one of the key elements while taking graduation photos is to record the joy during the day. Sometimes graduation photos are not only presented in the formal way, instead, you can take a few shots of family members and friends embracing each other. You can capture the joy and smile on people’s faces which could easily show the love and joy during the graduation day. Also, once you receive your diploma, you can get a picture of this moment.

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3. Get Some Landscape Shots

For most graduation photos, they are taken in front of some specific landscape view and buildings. You should be clear that these shots had better been taken at the beginning or end of the event when others are leaving. In such a case, you can obtain the landscape or building view without too many people which could make the photos more clear and interesting. For example, you can take the shots in an empty classroom which can easily reveal the real feeling to be a graduate.

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4. Throwing the cap

One of the most common idea for graduation photos is to throw the cap. But you had better choose a proper place to carry out this action. For example, you can choose your favorite background where capturing the action of throwing your cap, for example in front of the campus fountain, statue or playground. Here you should take more than hat throw photos in order to avoid some blurry photos during the photo shot.

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5. Formal and Casual Wear

If you have no further creative idea about the graduation photos, you can simply go this way. Prepare your formal graduation dress and another set of casual wear at the same time. Then take photos in these two sets of clothes and put them together to make a comparison. You can have these photos at the same spot. Also, you can have the same poses to make a distinctive comparison.

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6. Sports Action Shot

During your campus years, sports must be the unforgettable part. Why not shooting some sports action on the playground? Get your sportswear and find a professional photographer to capture your action shots. You can play football and soccer, or just act as a cheerleader and so on. This photo idea would tend to be quite full of passion and would remind you of the best time on the playground.

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7. With School Mascot

The school mascot can easily bring your back to your school life. So, don’t forget to take some graduation photos with your favorite school mascot. You can also invite other classmates to join you and some interesting actions could be captured during the shoting. You can hug your mascot one last time or invite your family to share the exciting moment with you. If the school mascot can be purchased from you school, you can have one for further reminding.

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8. With Graduation Balloons

For many schools, graduates can have some special graduation balloons during the graduation day. Why not bringing the balloons with you during the day? You can take the balloons to an outdoor spot to take photos and you can gradually let the balloons go away while taking the photos which could be a milestone for your life meaning up up and away.

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Part 3: How to Enhance Graduation Photos?

Here, you can take a try on Leawo PhotoIns. Leawo PhotoIns is quite appropriate for you to use if you really desire to enhance the graduation photo quality. This tool is powerful as an AI photo enhancer which can optimize your pictures immediately. Its features are comprehensive, including enhancing images, intelligently retouching skin, removing freckles, reducing noise, enlarging eyes, adjusting lighting automatically and so on. It is also good at improving photo quality with the methods of fixing image exposure issues automatically, boosting image lighting and color quality, improving photo contrast for greater visual effect and more. The user-interface of this software is user-friendly, which can be handled quite simply.

Step 1. Download Leawo PhotoIns

Download and install Leawo PhotoIns on your computer.

  • Photo-Enhancer
  • Leawo Photo Enhancer

    - Enhance portrait photos easily with advanced AI technology
    - Fix photo exposure and white balance issues automatically
    - Optimize photo colors and perfect photo tints
    - Make photos perfectly clear with smart dehaze
    - Boost photo lighting and color quality
    - Process RAW and JPG files

Step 2. Import source graduation photos

Once you have installed Leawo PhotoIns on your computer, then open it and import source photos you would like to enhance to this program. Enter the main interface of Leawo PhotoIns and you can load preferred photos into the program by clicking the option “Add Photo”. Or you can simply drag and drop your photos to this program directly. By the way, you can also right click on the loaded photos to delete them as you like. Furthermore, Leawo PhotoIns allows users to edit the photos in batch. You only need to click on “Add Files” to load other more photos.

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Step 3. Enhance graduation photos

After loading your preferred graduation photos to the tool, then you can start to enhance the photos. You can click the AI Enhance tab to choose the features, including "Automatic Lens Correction", "Face Enhance" and "Enlarge Eyes". Furthermore, you can find an effect adjuster bar right below the previewer which could allow you to set the degree of each effect.

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Step 4. Set output parameters

Once you have chosen your preferred effects and you have applied the AI Enhancer to your chosen pictures, now you need to click the bottom right output icon to proceed for output settings. On the Output Setting panel, you can complete the following things: “Save to” route, “Format”, “Quality”, “Naming”, “Resizing” and so on. Finally click “Output” to export the enhanced photo to your computer.

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